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Was the PMBOK Guide wrong?

Nader K. Rad, 2020-07-26

I read someone's comment on LinkedIn a few days ago, saying something more or less like, "Even PMI has confessed that they were wrong about the PMBOK Guide, and that's why they changed in the seventh edition."

Anything that stays the same for a long time is most likely wrong, or at least useless. For example, different types of pseudoscience, myths, religions, and cults stay fixed, while science evolves. Each scientific theory is sooner or later replaced by a better one. However, even the old theories are much better than many unscientific theories with the same scope.

The PMBOK Guide wasn't the absolute truth, and it wasn't without its faults, but the main reason we wrote the seventh edition from scratch was to be more inclusive of different approaches to running projects, and make it more flexible for the future. We didn't wake up one morning saying, "Oh, shit! The PMBOK Guide is wrong; let's rewrite it from scratch!".